HI Everyone
I am about to register a new domain and have a few questions about how SE's view domain names.

Would one of these variations be better than the other for higher SE placement?

canadaflowers --Will the SE's seperate canada & flowers
canada-flowers --- or is this better?


If my main market is Canada, will I place better in Canadian searches with a .ca domain?

Thanks

Scott

Ah the old hyphen or no hyphen. There is a very small advantage to using the hyphen. It does make the divission more obvious to the spiders. However this advantage is minor. Esp when you consider the problems you will have telling people the name of your web site and having the say "Canada hyphen flowers dot com." all the time.

That said, domain names are cheap. Why not get both and park them ontop of each other.

As for .ca, again get both versions if you want. Saves any confusion.

canadaflowers --Will the SE's seperate canada & flowers
canada-flowers --- or is this better?

I go with second one.

tld hardly matters for the serps but yes it may have on local search engines.

Domains are cheap, but I am inexperieced, and to maintain all those different domains, updating content is all done manually and would be a lot of work.
If I had two domain names; flowers.ca & flowers.com would the Se's penalize for identical content?
If so, would minor changes from one to site to another help? (Such as focus on US business on .com and Canadian business on .ca
Otherwise identical.

Thanks
Scott

keep in mind how people will remember your domain name as well, will they remember that there is a "-" in your name or not? just another way to think about it.

would the Se's penalize for identical content?

There is no penalty for identical content. If it can be penalized I would buy a new domain and then get the html source of my competitor and place it and bang my competitor is penalized but the actual case that happens is SE take into consideration that the two of them has identical content and depending on the internal PR and other major factors keep only one of them in the SERP's

This is a common mistake people tend to make when considering duplicate content because there are lots of people who believe in this manner and misinformation in various places and forums make it more difficult. I am not sure many will agree on this but some of the experience guy will surely.

I would get the .ca and .com. Then just point one of the domains to the other. It's a waste of time and space having two identical sites.

You wouldn't be maintaining a separate site for each domain name. You just park each on top of each other. Or else redirect form the minor domains to the main domain. It's exactly the same as how www.example.com is parked ontop of example.com. It's not duplication, it's just different names for the same place.

To be listed in the Canadian Google you need either:

(1) a .ca domain (which can only be registered to a Canadian address); or
(2) hosting on a server located in Canada

Get both. You don't want your competitors to grab canada-flowers.com
while you have canadaflowers.com

I do agree with Chris Choi, get both domain...

kashyap